Marie-Claire Blais Born: Québec City, Canada; October 5, 1939
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Marie-Claire Blais Born: Québec City, Canada; October 5, 1939 Widely considered Québec’s most important living writer, Marie-Claire Blais has written prolifically about the dark side of human experience. Biography this period, Blais was writing feverishly and taking Marie-Claire Blais was born in a working-class night classes in philosophy and literature at the neighborhood of Québec City, Canada, on Octo- university. It was there that she made two crucial ber 5, 1939. The eldest of five, Blais was a shy and contacts: Professor Jeanne Lapointe, Laval’s first unpopular child, although precociously obsessed female literature professor, who became a men- with writing; she composed her first poem at the tor; and Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, head of age of six and her first novel, about a boy sold to social sciences and well-connected in literary cir- the circus by his father, at fifteen. By high school, cles. When Blais approached the latter for help she was totally devoted to her craft, spending long getting published, he looked over her briefcase of hours at her typewriter and reading widely beyond messy manuscripts and encouraged her to come the prescribed curriculum. Her parents initially back to him with one coherent piece of writing. tolerated her writing, although they judged it a Two weeks later, she returned with the draft of her waste of time that would never earn money; one first novel,La belle bête (lit. “The beautiful beast”; day, however, her mother read a manuscript she trans. Mad Shadows), and Lévesque immediately found in a drawer, and, horrified by its disturbing took it to a publisher. The novel appeared in 1959, contents, threw it into the fire, provoking a major when Blais was twenty years old. It sold 5,000 cop- fight with her daughter. ies in six weeks, earning her immediate national Although her father, Fernand Blais, had a good and international acclaim. job as an electrician at Laval Dairy, he struggled to Based on this success, Blais secured a grant to support his wife and five children. As a result, Blais study in Paris for a year, although she was unhappy was forced, at fifteen, to cut her convent-school abroad and moved to back to Canada in 1960. She education short in order to earn a living. She shared a house in Montréal with several university worked in a shoe factory, then at a series of office students, read widely in German and English, and jobs (nine in the space of a few short years), all continued to write. In 1962, she was discovered by of which she despised. She was repeatedly fired the famous American critic Edmund Wilson, who because bosses inferred, from the large stack of helped her secure a Guggenheim Fellowship; she manuscripts she toted around, that she was doing held it the following year in Cambridge, Massa- work for other people on their time. A version of chusetts. Her notebooks from this time describe this unhappy period is distilled in the semi-autobi- her feelings of loneliness and isolation from the ographical trilogy The Manuscripts of Pauline Arch- Harvard elite. They were published as a weekly ange. column in the Montréal newspaper Le Devoir and With the independent income from her cleri- later collected in Parcours d’un écrivain: Notes amér- cal work, Blais was able to move out into a room icaines (1993; trans. American Notebooks: A Writer’s near Laval University, which she plastered with Journey, 1996). anguished and macabre faces of children, young From 1964–1969, Blais lived on Cape Cod with men, and women cut out of magazines; these a community of artists and intellectuals that in- monstrous images inspired the suffering, tortured cluded Wilson and his wife, Elena, as well as the characters that populate her early novels. During artist Mary Meigs and her partner, political activist 280 American Lit Abbey-Chopin_Vol1_pp001-536.indd 280 10/27/16 3:31 AM Marie-Claire Blais Barbara Deming. Blais read and wrote prolifical- mates. Her most famous novel, A Season in the Life ly during this time, publishing her most famous of Emmanuel (1965), describes a year in the life of novel, Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season the children in a large, poverty-stricken rural fam- in the Life of Emmanuel) in 1965. The novel con- ily. The squalor, illness, maiming, early death, and firmed her as one of Québec’s preeminent writ- sexual predation that befall the various siblings in ers and was awarded the prestigious French Prix this novel are typical of Blais’s depictions of child- Médicis. She spent the next several years traveling hood as unprotected from the violence and bru- among Brittany, Paris, and Montréal with Meigs, tality of society. who had become her lover and would remain a Homosexual identity and community are other lifelong friend. central concerns in Blais’s writing. Although she Since the late 1970s, Blais has been dividing has deliberately resisted being called a ‘lesbian’ her time between Québec and Key West, Florida, writer, preferring a more universal label, she has which, since the 1930s, has been a famous hub dealt directly with lesbian experience in several for writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Ten- of her works, first in a monologue written for the nessee Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. Blais is feminist theatrical collaboration La nef des sorcières very private and seldom appears at public events, (1976) and then, most famously, in Nights in the but she continues to write prolifically. Her most Underground (1978). Building on the themes ex- recent publication is the seven-part cycle of nov- plored in her monologue, this novel presents a els beginning with Soifs (1995; trans. These Festive more encompassing view of Montréal’s lesbian Nights, 1997). To date, Blais has written over twen- scene, offering a hopeful vision of mutual love ty novels, five plays, two collections of poetry, and and support among women. This utopian ideal is a number of nonfiction works. Her novels have however called into question in subsequent nov- been translated into multiple languages, adapted els, including The Angel of Solitude (1989), set in a into films, and won many prestigious national and lesbian commune, which paints a grim picture of international awards. a world ravaged by AIDS. Her 1995 novel, These Festive Nights, similarly depicts a group of friends Analysis who have assembled to say goodbye to a male Over the course of a career that has spanned six friend who is dying of the same disease. decades, Blais has remained true to an affirma- In spite of the poverty, frustration, and cruel- tion she made in one of her earliest interviews: “I ty that are ubiquitous in Blais’s writing, there are, write about monsters because they are alone and nevertheless, recurring sites of hope and optimism unloved […] I will always write about the ugly or in her work. Although relationships are fraught the bad.” Though differing in style and tone, her and often unsuccessful, Blais depicts the continu- novels are united by their sympathetic portrayals ous striving to forge meaningful connections with of people who are “alone and unloved”; they are others. She also remains committed to the power populated by the oppressed and marginalized of art, with artists of all kinds appearing through- members of society, particularly children, women, out her writing. In particular, her later novels con- and racial and sexual minorities. Gritty and un- tain many descriptions of the transcendent beauty flinching in their depictions of poverty, misery, of music. Blais has also described her recent work and despair, Blais’s works nevertheless contain as a kind of polyphonic music, with each charac- forceful depictions of human connectedness and ter contributing a strain of the melody to build a an abiding faith in the redemptive power of art. massive human chorus. Blais’s early novels focus mainly on the lives of Blais’s style has evolved over the many decades troubled children and adolescents. Her first book, of her writing career. Her earliest novels read al- Mad Shadows (1959), deals with the tortured rela- most as fairy tales, featuring larger-than-life char- tionship between a brother and sister, the former acters and dreamy, non-specific settings.A Season beautiful but stupid, the later intelligent but ugly. in the Life of Emmanuel (1965) marks a shift to a Her follow-up, Tête Blanche (1960), details the con- more realistic mode: its characters are more nu- flicting impulses of a solitary child who oscillates anced, its landscapes more specific. Blais will between cruelty and tenderness towards his class- continue in a realistic mode in The Manuscripts of 281 American Lit Abbey-Chopin_Vol1_pp001-536.indd 281 10/27/16 3:31 AM Marie-Claire Blais Pauline Archange (1968), which closely describes readers were charmed by the book’s quaintness. the lower-middle class Québec society in which Back home, however, reaction was polarized: Blais herself grew up. At the same time, this novel while some criticized its dismal view of society, oth- will inaugurate a use of a lyricism that will come to ers hailed it as an opening salvo in a cultural revo- characterize her writing. lution that was just beginning to gain momentum. Her most recent novel cycle, comprising the The book takes place in the 1940s–50s, a period seven-part series inaugurated by Soifs (These Festive during which the Catholic Church held tremen- Nights), make use of a highly poetic, stream-of-con- dous power in Québec. The Church not only pro- sciousness narration that drifts in and out of var- moted conservative values (tradition, authority, ious characters’ perspectives.